Welcome to your interview.
The question is on your right: Prioritize Technical Debt Before Color Portfolio Launch. Take a moment with it first.
Talk your thinking through with me if you like - when you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes). Discussion and graded submissions share your five interviewer interactions, so spend them well.
Benjamin Moore is preparing a 12-week release for its contractor and retailer digital ecosystem, including updates to the benjaminmoore.com product catalog, dealer-facing inventory services, and color recommendation flows tied to the Color Portfolio® app. Your engineering team of 8 owns the shared platform services behind product data, pricing, and store availability. The release is business-critical because Marketing has already committed to a seasonal campaign featuring Aura®, Regal® Select, and ben® products, and Retail Operations needs the platform stable before peak spring demand.
The Director of Digital Product wants all committed customer-facing features shipped on time. Retail Operations wants fewer inventory sync issues affecting store associates and independent dealers. Customer Care is pushing for fixes to recurring support tickets tied to incorrect sheen and availability data. Finance has approved only limited contractor spend and expects no slip to the campaign date.
You have 12 weeks, a fixed budget of $90,000 for external QA and cloud costs, and no additional full-time headcount. Of the 8 engineers, 2 are tied up 30% of their time supporting production incidents. The team has identified 18 technical debt items, including a legacy pricing service with 22% test coverage, a nightly inventory batch job that fails 3 times per month, and duplicated product-attribute logic across 4 services. Three new launch features are already committed and estimated at 26 engineering weeks total.